Nine people had to be rescued from a riverside caravan park after it was suddenly inundated by floodwater in northeast Victoria.
The Australian Associated Press reports that a family of five, a semi-retired couple and the two owners of the Walwa Caravan Park were helped out by Victorian State Emergency Service volunteers in dinghies on Tuesday night when the park flooded.
Semi-retired caretaker Gary Cooper, a former resident of the NSW Northern Rivers region, told AAP he was no stranger to flooding, but remarked on the speed of the rising water.
“It’s a totally different flooding here. It’s very quick,” he said. “We thought it was all under control.”
But the water soon prevented vehicles leaving the park.
Victoria State Emergency Service responded to a staggering 13,705 requests for assistance in October. PIC: VICSES
“We couldn’t get out, so we got rescued,” Mr Cooper said.
Walwa Caravan Park owner Heidi Conway told AAP the floodwaters were unlike anything she had seen.
“This one was quite intensive and it was flowing really, really fast,” she said. “So, it was time to go.”
Last month was the busiest month in history for the Victoria State Emergency Service (VICSES), with volunteers responding to a staggering 13, 705 requests for assistance.
It’s almost a 28% increase on the previous record of 10,740 requests, set in June 2021.
VICSES Chief Officer, Operations, Tim Wiebusch paid tribute to the resilience and dedication of the 5,000 SES volunteers across Victoria.
“It’s been an incredibly busy month for our VICSES volunteers responding to multiple severe weather events,” he said. “I’m really proud of the work our VICSES volunteers have undertaken and continue to do to assist so many community members with great support from our partner agencies.”
Happily, the heavy rainfall in Victoria is forecast to ease over the next few days.
As grey nomads are all too keenly aware, the weather in many parts of the country has been absolutely brutal. Going back months, there has been extensive flooding that has caused campsite evacuations, road closures … and massive disruption to travel plans.
And it’s not just been the rain that has caught many travellers unawares.
The South Australian outback town of Oodnadatta has just been hit by winds of almost 140 kilometres per hour.
Pink Roadhouse owner Peter Moore told the ABC that he had never seen anything like it and its accommodation, laundry and kitchen were badly damaged.
“It was incredible — lifted tin off the roofs, flattened our laundry block, flattened our fencing, it just goes on and on,” he said. “The last highest recorded wind velocity was in 1941 at 141 km/h; this one was 139.5km/h, so it was very strong.”
The Pink Roadhouse has its own generator, but many people in the town after facing several days without electricity. And the road into the town is closed, preventing deliveries getting through.
“We’ll gear up for a big happy hour on Friday night to celebrate getting through the week past,” Mr Moore told the ABC.
In brighter meteorological news, the Bureau of Meteorology has just released its long-range forecast and, although the La Niña weather system means early summer rainfall is likely to be above median for most of the eastern third of Australia, the mercury is still going to soar.
The meteorologists say that – from November to January – maximum temperatures are likely to be above median for Tasmania, most of WA, the NT, and coastal north Queensland. And the Bureau says minimum temperatures are likely to be warmer than median across Australia.
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It took them a long time to sort out that it was only a sixteen month manufacturing window of stoves with the fault.
Meanwhile everyone who had one of their stoves even if it was twelve years old was affected for quite some time until now.
A fairly large DER factor involved there.
Glad that its been finally sorted out now so that the rest of us can get on with what we were doing originally.